Culture

Captured on Oct. 20, 2020 during the OSIRIS-REx mission's Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event, this series of images shows the SamCam imager's field of view as the NASA spacecraft approaches and touches down on asteroid Bennu's surface, over 200 million miles (321 million km) away from Earth. The sampling event brought the spacecraft all the way down to sample site Nightingale, touching down within three feet (one meter) of the targeted location. The team on Earth received confirmation at 6:08 pm EDT that successful touchdown occurred. Preliminary data show the one-foot-wide (0.3-meter-wide) sampling head touched Bennu's surface for approximately 6 seconds, after which the spacecraft performed a back-away burn.

The spacecraft's sampling arm - called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) - is visible in the lower part of the frame. The round head at the end of TAGSAM is the only part of OSIRIS-REx that contacted the surface during the sample collection event. In the middle of the image sequence, the sampling head positions itself to contact the asteroid's surface head-on. Shortly after, the sampling head impacts site Nightingale and penetrates Bennu's regolith. Upon initial contact, the TAGSAM head appears to crush some of the porous rocks underneath it. One second later, the spacecraft fires a nitrogen gas bottle, which mobilizes a substantial amount of the sample site's material. Preliminary data show the spacecraft spent approximately 5 of the 6 seconds of contact collecting surface material, and the majority of sample collection occurred within the first 3 seconds.

The TAGSAM is designed to catch the agitated surface material, and the mission team will assess the amount of material collected through various spacecraft activities. After touchdown, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to back away from Bennu. As expected, this maneuver also disturbed the Nightingale site, and loose debris is visible near the end of the image sequence. Preliminary telemetry shows the spacecraft remains in good health. The spacecraft was traveling at 0.2 mph (10 cm/sec) when it contacted sample site Nightingale and then backed away at 0.9 mph (40 cm/sec).

These images were captured over approximately a five-minute period. The imaging sequence begins at about 82 feet (25 meters) above the surface, and runs through the back-away maneuver, with the last image in the sequence taken at approximately 43 feet (13 meters) in altitude - about 35 seconds after backing away. The sequence was created using 82 SamCam images, with 1.25 seconds between frames. For context, the images are oriented with Bennu's west at the top.

Both Taiwan and New Zealand have successfully eliminated COVID-19 with world-leading pandemic responses. By taking a particularly proactive approach, Taiwan's response was probably the most effective and least disruptive of any country's, researchers say.

In an article published in the international journal, The Lancet Regional Health: Western Pacific, researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand, the National Taiwan University and the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, examine the pandemic responses of the two island countries 9,000 kilometres apart.

Both countries mounted very effective responses to COVID-19 and both had successfully eliminated community transmission by early August, although New Zealand experienced a localised outbreak in the Auckland region shortly after.

The lead author of the research paper, Dr Jennifer Summers, from the University of Otago, Wellington, says the two countries used different approaches to respond to their first waves of COVID-19.

Taiwan acted very early to control the virus, introducing health screening of air passengers on the day the World Health Organization was informed of the outbreak in Wuhan on 31 December 2019.

"Despite Taiwan's closer proximity to Wuhan and its high population density it experienced a substantially lower incidence rate of 20.7 cases per million compared with New Zealand's 278 per million.

"Their timely and vigorous response allowed Taiwan to avoid the national lockdown used in New Zealand to eliminate community transmission."

In both countries, outbreaks of COVID-19 prompted public health officials to introduce a range of measures including contact tracing, testing and isolating of cases and quarantine of close contacts.

Fellow author Professor Michael Baker from the University of Otago, Wellington, says Taiwan benefited by having a Centers for Disease Control in place, as well as a National Health Command Center dedicated to responding to emerging threats such as pandemics. Because of historically low levels of investment in public health, New Zealand was forced to take a more reactive approach to the pandemic with a stringent national lockdown to eliminate COVID-19 transmission while essential response capacities were rapidly developed.

"Taiwan's pandemic response had been extensively planned, partly as a result of their experience in the SARS pandemic in 2003, and was set up so it could be rapidly adapted to new pathogens.

"As in many Asian countries that had experiences with SARS, Taiwan had an established culture of face mask use by the public, as well as a proactive policy of supporting production and distribution of masks to all residents."

Both countries provided social and financial support during the pandemic and have existing universal health coverage.

The researchers make a list of recommendations to other countries, particularly high-income nations, as they continue to respond to the current pandemic and prepare for the next one.

They include: establishing a national public health agency; developing a flexible pandemic plan; investing in resources and infrastructure to allow a rapid-response to disease threats; improving workforce training, including considering a field epidemiology training programme; auditing the pandemic response to date; and updating public health laws to enable pandemic control measures to be implemented while balancing the need to protect personal rights and liberties.

More detailed recommendations include the need to improve surveillance of disease outbreaks, develop effective border management policies, establish robust quarantine rules, further develop conventional and digital solutions to allow for contact tracing and quarantine and isolation monitoring and introduce an effective means of distributing face masks and promoting their use.

COVID-19 and America's response to it are likely to profoundly affect our families, work lives, relationships and gender roles for years, say 12 prominent scientists and authors who analyzed 90 research studies and used their expertise to evaluate our reaction to the pandemic and predict its aftermath.

The group, which included several UCLA researchers, foresees enduring psychological fallout from the crisis, even among those who haven't been infected. Their predictions and insights, published Oct. 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, include:

Planned pregnancies will decrease in a disease-ridden world, birthrates will drop, and many couples will postpone marriage, said senior author and UCLA professor of psychology and communication studies Martie Haselton.

People who are single are less likely to start new relationships. Women who can afford to be on their own are likely to stay single longer, Haselton said.

With children home due to the pandemic, women are spending more time providing care and schooling, are less available for paying work and may come to rely more on male partners as breadwinners, Haselton said. This will push us toward socially conservative gender norms and potentially result in a backslide in gender equality.

Unlike many past crises, this pandemic is not bringing people closer together and, despite some exceptions, it is not producing an increase in kindness, empathy or compassion, especially in the U.S., said lead author Benjamin Seitz, a UCLA psychology doctoral student with expertise in behavioral neuroscience.

"Our species is not wired for seeking a precise understanding of the world as it actually is," the authors write, and our tribal predispositions toward groupthink are resulting in the large-scale spread of misinformation We tend to seek out data that supports our opinions, and we too often distrust health experts, they say.

"The psychological, social and societal consequences of COVID-19 will be very long-lasting," Haselton said. "The longer COVID-19 continues, the more entrenched these changes are likely to be."

COVID-19: A worldwide social experiment

As marriage rates plummet and people postpone reproduction in a virus-plagued world, some nations' populations will shrink and fall precipitously below "replacement level," the authors write. These birthrate drops, in turn, can have cascading social and economic consequences, affecting job opportunities, straining the ability of countries to provide a safety net for their aging populations and potentially leading to global economic contraction.

Research has shown that even before the pandemic, women were more stressed than men by family and job responsibilities. Now they are managing more household responsibilities related to child care and education. In medicine and other sciences, women scholars are already publishing substantially less research than they did a year ago, while men are showing increased productivity, Haselton said.

She and her co-authors foresee a shift toward social conservatism. A consequence of the pandemic could be less tolerance for legal abortion and the rights for sexual minorities who don't align with traditional gender roles. In addition, in a time of economic inequality, many women will sexualize themselves more to compete with one another for desirable men, Haselton said.

People who meet online will often be disappointed when they meet in person. "Does a couple have chemistry? You can't tell that over Zoom," Haselton said. In new relationships, people will miss cues, especially online, and the disappointing result will often be overidealization of a potential partner -- seeing the person the way you want the person to be rather than the way the person actually is.

The pandemic has become a worldwide social experiment, say the authors, whose areas of expertise include psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, evolutionary biology, medicine, evolutionary social science and economics.

An evolutionary struggle

For the study, the authors used an evolutionary perspective to highlight the strategies the virus has evolved to use against us, the strategies we possess to combat it and the strategies we need to acquire.

Humans today are the products of social and genetic evolution in environments that look very little like our current world. These "evolutionary mismatches" are likely responsible for our frequent lack of alarm in response to the pandemic, the scientists write.

Americans in particular value individuality and the ability to challenge authority. "This combination does not work especially well in a pandemic," Seitz said. "This virus is exposing us and our weaknesses."

Haselton agreed, calling the virus "wily" for its ability to infect us through contact with people we love who seem to be healthy. "Our social features that define much of what it is to be human make us a prime target for viral exploitation," she said. "Policies asking us to isolate and distance profoundly affect our families, work lives, relationships and gender roles."

All infectious agents, including viruses, are under evolutionary pressure to manipulate the physiology and behavior of their hosts -- in this case, us -- in ways that enhance their survival and transmission. SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, may be altering human neural tissue to change our behavior, the authors say. It may be suppressing feelings of sickness, and perhaps even enhancing our social impulses, during times of peak transmissibility before symptoms appear. People who are infected but do not feel sick are more likely to go about their usual activities and come in contact with others whom they might infect.

Disgust is useful and motivates us to avoid people who display clear signs of disease -- such as blood, pale skin, lesions, yellow eyes or a runny nose. But with COVID-19 infections, this is not what most people see. Family, friends, co-workers and strangers can look perfectly healthy and be asymptomatic for days without knowing they are infected, the authors note.

It may sound counterintuitive, but normal brain development requires exposure to a diverse set of microbes to help prepare younger animals for a range of pathogenic dangers they may encounter in adulthood. But safer-at-home and quarantine health measures have temporarily halted social activities that would otherwise bring millions of adolescents into contact with new microbes. As a result, children and adolescents whose immune systems and brains would, in normal times, be actively shaped by microbial exposures may be adversely impacted by this change, the scientists say.

By understanding how SARS-CoV-2 is evolving and having behavioral and psychological effects on us that enhance its transmission, we will be better able to combat it so it becomes less harmful and less lethal, the authors write.

In an increasingly urbanized world, population density often leads to more deaths and injuries when floods, typhoons, landslides and other disasters strike cities.

But the risks to life and limb are compounded when earthquakes are the agent of destruction, because they not only kill and maim but can also cripple the hospitals needed to treat survivors.

Now, an international research team led by the Stanford Blume Center for Earthquake Engineering has developed a methodology to help disaster preparedness officials in large cities make contingency plans on a region-wide basis to make sure that emergency responders can get patients to the hospital facilities that are likeliest to remain in commission after a quake.

"Previously, most hospital preparedness plans could only look at smaller areas because they focused on single hospitals," said Anne Kiremidjian, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and a co-author, with colleague Greg Deierlein, of a paper published in Nature Communications.

Regional response to quakes is not completely new in quake-prone California, where after the 1994 Northridge earthquake the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency used shortwave and ham radios to coordinate the movement of patients among 76 hospitals in the damage zone.

To assure hospital survivability, the California state legislature has mandated that all acute care hospitals are brought up to current seismic standards by 2030. "We need to ensure that hospitals remain operational to treat patients and avoid greater loss of life," Deierlein said.

The new research provides disaster response officials in seismically active countries like Turkey, Chile, Indonesia or Peru with an effective but relatively simple way to create regional contingency plans: Start by using statistical risk analysis models to estimate where deaths and injuries are likeliest to occur in populous metropolitan areas; apply building-specific performance assessment techniques to project how much damage different hospitals might suffer; and map out the best routes between hospitals should the need arise to move injured patients to less damaged facilities with available capacity.

The new regional planning methodology comes at a time when the world is awakening to the consequences of population growth and dense urbanization. When the researchers looked at 21,000 disasters that have occurred worldwide since 1900, half of those with the largest injury totals occurred during the last 20 years. For example, the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Izmit, Turkey, caused approximately 50,000 injuries and disrupted 10 major hospitals.

Luis Ceferino, who coordinated the research as a PhD candidate in civil engineering at Stanford, said the paper focused on what happened in 2007, after an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Pisco, about 150 miles from Lima, Peru. Pisco lost more than half its total number of hospital beds in a few minutes.

Ceferino also worked with two other two experts in hospital responses, professor Celso Bambarén from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru and Judith Mitrani-Reiser of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, who gathered post-quake damage assessments from the Pisco temblor and the 8.8 magnitude temblor that occurred in 2010 near Maule on the central coast of Chile, data that also helps to inform the new methodology.

"Hospital systems are at the core of disaster resilience," said Ceferino, who will become an assistant professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University in 2021. "Cities need regional contingency plans to ensure that hospitals, doctors and medical teams are ready to care for our most vulnerable populations."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Scientists estimate that nearly 60% of all cancer patients do not respond effectively to chemotherapy treatments. Even worse - many of those same patients experience toxic and sometimes deadly side effects.

Now, a Purdue University scientist and entrepreneur is working to use simple LED light to help determine if certain chemotherapy options will work for specific patients. The work is published in Scientific Reports.

"We are using a technique very similar to doppler radar used in weather to advance personalized medicine," said David Nolte, the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in Purdue's College of Science. "We take the LED light and shine it on biopsies. We then apply chemotherapy to the biopsies and analyze how the light scatters off the tissues."

Nolte, who also is a member of the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research, said the light scattering dynamics give scientists and doctors detailed information about the likelihood of a chemotherapy drug being effective for a patient. Nolte said they have results within 24 hours. This first trial looked at biodynamic imaging on human patients with ovarian cancer.

"We look for signs of apoptosis, or what we call the controlled death of cells," Nolte said. "Apoptosis is the signal that indicates the effectiveness of the chemotherapy for this patient's tissues and tumors. For some cancers, there are so many treatment options available that it's like a doctor is trying to fit square pegs in circular holes until a desired outcome is found. We want to make this process better for patients."

Nolte has worked with several groups within the Purdue entrepreneurial and commercialization ecosystem, including the Purdue Foundry, on business plan development and management searches. AniDyn, a medical technology startup, was spun out of Purdue by professors Nolte and John J. Turek. AniDyn is focused on the development and commercialization of live-tissue imaging platform technologies.

Nolte also works closely with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent and license his technologies.

About Purdue Research Foundation

The Purdue Research Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. Established in 1930, the foundation accepts gifts; administers trusts; funds scholarships and grants; acquires property; protects Purdue's intellectual property; and promotes entrepreneurial activities on behalf of Purdue. The foundation manages the Purdue Foundry, Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization, Purdue Research Park, Purdue Technology Centers and University Development Office. In 2020, the IPWatchdog Institute ranked Purdue third nationally in startup creation and in the top 20 for patents. The foundation received the 2019 Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities Award for Place from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. For more information on licensing a Purdue innovation, contact the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization at otcip@prf.org. For more information about involvement and investment opportunities in startups based on a Purdue innovation, contact the Purdue Foundry at foundry@prf.org.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today's toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 5 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at purdue.edu.

Writer: Chris Adamcladam@prf.org

Source: David Noltenolte@purdue.edu

Researchers have found that a class of commonly-used heart drugs may also improve patients' responses to anti-cancer immunotherapies called PD(L)1 inhibitors, according to preliminary findings to be presented at the 32th EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, which is taking place online.

Angiotensin receptor II blockers (ARBs) are often prescribed for high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney failure and following a heart attack. They work by reducing the action of a chemical called angiotensin II, which plays a role in narrowing blood vessels and increasing blood pressure. ARBs block AT1 receptors that angiotensin II works on, and which are found in the heart, blood vessels and kidneys. [2]

Dr Julius Strauss, co-director of the clinical trials group at the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, at the USA's National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research, presented this latest research. He said: "There are data suggesting that when angiotensin II, a protein in the body, binds to one of its receptors, AT1R, it has the potential to increase the levels of other proteins, VEGF and TGF beta, both of which have been linked to cancer growth and resistance to the immune system."

The researchers thought that this overlap between the angiotensin II and the TGF beta pathways might mean that it plays a crucial role in the onset of cancer, its growth and also how cancer cells evade the immune system.

"We decided to look at all the medications our patients were taking to see if any common medication or class of drugs might increase the likelihood of responding to anti-PD(L)1 treatment. After an initial review, ARBs seemed to be the most promising," said Dr Strauss.

He analysed data from 597 patients being treated with anti-PD(L)1 drugs [3] in 20 clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in the USA. The patients had more than three dozen different cancers, including prostate, lung, colon, ovarian, bladder and cervical cancers. Many were already taking ARBs or angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors for heart problems unrelated to their cancer.

Dr Strauss compared 71 patients who were taking ARBs together with their PD(L)1 inhibitor with those who were not. He also compared 82 patients receiving ACE inhibitors with those who were not. [4]

"Patients who were taking ARBs seemed to respond better and more often to anti PD(L)1 therapy for their cancer than patients who were not. We found that ARBs were associated with a statistically significant increase in the objective response rate as well as the complete response rate, compared to patients not taking ARBs," he said.

Among patients taking ARBs, the objective response rate (ORR), meaning the cancer had shrunk at least 30%, was 34% compared to 17% in patients not taking ARBs, while the complete response (CR) rate, meaning the cancer had shrunk 100% and could no longer be seen on scans, was 11% in patients taking ARBS compared to 3% in those who were not. However, there was no statistically significant improvement in ORR or CR rates among patients taking ACE inhibitors compared to those who were not taking them.

Dr Strauss said: "The possible reason for the different effects seen with ARBs and ACE inhibitors might be that although angiotensin II increases levels of VEGF and TGF beta when it binds to the AT1R receptor, it can actually decrease levels of VEGF and TGF beta when it binds to another receptor, AT2R. Therefore, ARBs which selectively block just AT1R potentially work better at lowering VEGF and TGF beta levels than ACE inhibitors which block both AT1R and AT2R.

He continued: "In addition to ARBs potentially increasing the likelihood of responding to anti-PD(L)1 therapy, we also saw evidence that ARBs may help patients live longer. This beneficial effect of ARBS was seen in some cancer types more than others and was most notable in bladder cancer.

"However, these findings are very preliminary and other trials are needed to evaluate if ARBs may be beneficial to patients with cancer and to determine what, if any, cancer types may benefit the most, particularly in combination with anti-PD(L)1 therapy."

Professor Udai Banerji, a member of the scientific committee for the Symposium and Deputy Director of the Drug Development Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London (UK), was not involved with this research. He commented: "This hypothesis-generating population-based study offers interesting insights into the role of the interaction of the immune and cardiovascular system in promoting cancer. There is room for improvement for the clinical efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as anti-PD(L)1 therapies. If these findings are validated in preclinical experiments and clinical trials this would be a tremendous opportunity to repurpose existing cardiovascular drugs to be used in combination with immune checkpoint drugs to improve outcomes of cancer patients."

- Language is one of the most powerful tools available to humanity, and determining why and when language evolved is central to understand what it means to be human

- Being able to track relationships between words in a sentence, both next to one another and across a sentence, is foundational to language processing. This ability was examined in monkeys, apes and humans by researchers from the University of Warwick and University of Zurich.

- Apes and monkeys were able to track relationships between sounds the same way as humans, showing that this ability predates the evolution of language itself by at least 30-40 million years

The capacity for language is built upon our ability to understand combinations of words and the relationships between them, but the evolutionary history of this ability is little understood. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have managed to date this capacity to at least 30-40 million years ago, the last common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

Across the globe, humanity flourishes by sharing thoughts, culture, information and technology through language - an incredibly complex method of communication used by no other species. Determining why and when it evolved is, therefore, crucial to understanding what it means to be human.

In the paper, 'Non adjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes and humans', published today in the journal Science Advances, an international consortium of researchers, led by Professor Simon Townsend at the University of Warwick, made a crucial advance in our understanding of when a key cognitive building block of language may have evolved.

Being able to process relationships between words in a sentence is one of the key cognitive abilities underpinning language, whether those words are next to one another, known as an 'adjacent dependency', or distant to one another, known as a 'non-adjacent dependency'. For example, in the sentence "the dog who bit the cat ran away" we understand that is it the dog who ran away rather than the cat, thanks to being able to process the relationship between the first and last phrases.

Dr. Stuart Watson, who carried out this work at the University of Zürich, explains:
"Most animals do not produce non-adjacent dependencies in their own natural communication systems, but we wanted to know whether they might nevertheless be able to understand them."

The research team used a novel experimental approach for their experiments: They created "artificial grammars" in which sequences made up of meaningless tones instead of words were used to examine the abilities of subjects to process the relationships between sounds. This made it possible to compare the ability to recognize non-contiguous dependencies between three different primate species, even though they do not share a common language. The experiments were carried out with common marmosets (a Brazilian monkey), chimpanzees and humans.

The researchers found that all three species were readily able to process the relationships between both adjacent and non-adjacent sound elements. Non-adjacent dependency processing is, therefore, widespread in the primate family.

The implications of this finding are significant, says Professor Townsend, "This indicates that this critical feature of language already existed in our ancient primate ancestors, predating the evolution of language itself by at least 30 - 40 million years."

New research suggests an algorithm could be used to help optimise the sharing of healthcare resources during the Covid-19 pandemic, preventing NHS intensive care units (ICU) from becoming overwhelmed.

The study, led by Queen Mary University of London, proposes a load balancing method to transfer critical ICU patients across hospitals and optimally allocate new patients, which could help to reduce stress on health systems in the second wave and potential subsequent waves to come.

The research team, which included scientists from the University of Exeter and the University of Bristol, tested the algorithm using available data from both the UK's NHS and Spanish health system. They showed that this mathematical approach could help redistribute up to 1000 ICU patients that otherwise likely wouldn't receive the appropriate intensive care.

During the pandemic, demand for ICUs varies across a country, with some hospitals receiving substantial numbers of patients early on in an outbreak whilst others are unaffected. These differences in demand create an opportunity to balance the load of patient admissions across hospitals, by rerouting patients from areas of high demand to local hospitals that have spare capacity.

Rerouting and load balancing solutions have a long history in areas such as computer networks, where usually different tasks are assigned to different interconnected servers and the servers can communicate and transfer tasks in order to minimise the global processing time. In this study, the researchers adopted a similar approach to manage ICU resources in hospital networks, where the "load" to be allocated is the amount of ICU patients or ventilators, and the rerouting takes place across hospitals.

Using the algorithm the researchers showed that when ICU demand is uniform across the country it is possible to enable access for up to 1000 additional cases in the UK in a single step of the algorithm, without needing to increase capacity. In more realistic scenarios, where we see differences in demand across hospitals or regions, the scientists found their new method could balance about 600 beds per step in the Spanish system when sharing resources locally, and over 1300 using countrywide sharing, potentially saving a large percentage of these lives that would otherwise not have access to ICUs.

It is hoped this mathematical approach could also be used to help reduce demand when the epidemic begins to decline, allowing hospitals to return back to normal as efficiently as possible.

Dr Leon Danon, Senior Lecturer in Data Analytics at the University of Exeter, said: "The current Covid-19 pandemic has put many national health systems under significant pressure, particularly for ICUs and ventilators. So far balancing patient loads in times of high demand has occurred spontaneously, for example with hospitals sharing daily information on demand and availability of resources with colleagues in other local hospitals. Whilst this quick action can help in the immediate, once multiple hospital become overwhelmed the pattern of demand becomes more complex and a more systematic approach is needed. Our load sharing methodology can help to prevent health services becoming overwhelmed by the excessive demand for intensive care, which is particularly critical when the second wave we are experiencing can now be coupled with the flu season."

Dr Lucas Lacasa, Reader in Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary, said: "We have validated that the method works with realistic data from the UK and Spain, and shown it can be used to load balance patients in real time. We are currently in the process of exploring how to operationalise the method within the healthcare system, and are developing a user-friendly interface for the NHS, or other health systems across the globe, to be able to embed this technology within the set of measures each country is already deploying to manage the pandemic."

"The method is easily portable to other countries as well, and whilst this load sharing algorithm has primarily been developed for the current pandemic, there's no reason a similar approach couldn't be used to load balance other healthcare resources."

HOUSTON - (Oct. 21, 2020) - How life works may come down to dumbbell-like bits of DNA.

Rice University scientists on a long quest to study the structure and function of chromosomes have found that amid the apparent chaotic state of DNA during interphase, when cells are between divisions, there are pockets of order in the configuration of certain gene-containing regions.

These structures, reported in an open-access eLife study, offer a window into how chromosomes function and promise new avenues of research for those digging into their secrets.

The work led by Rice postdoctoral fellow and lead author Ryan Cheng and principal investigator José Onuchic, co-director of the Rice-based Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), employs sophisticated simulations and evidence from experiments to suggest several new aspects of chromosome configuration and function.

"In molecular biology and gene expression, people talk about transcription factors and inhibitors and enhancers, but it seems there is no structural information," Onuchic said. "With advances in looking at chromatin structures, it starts to become possible to know how these structures and chromatin dynamics control gene expression.

"This paper suggests, for the first time, a mechanism connecting genome structure and gene expression," he said.

The researchers lay out four results from their coarse-grained Minimal Chromatin Model (MiChroM), a technique drawn from 20 years of experience with their energy landscape theory for predicting the structure of proteins.

First, they used MiChroM to predict chromosome structural ensembles for different cell types using the associated epigenetic markers as the sole input, finding the predictions to be consistent with experimental observations.

In previous research, they used MiChroM to simulate individual chromosomes in lymphoblastoid cells. The new work implies that the principles they discovered in that work also apply generally to different human cell types, highlighting the transferability of their theoretical model.

Second, with data from experiments using 3D tracing, which helps to directly visualize the tangle of DNA in a cell's nucleus during interphase, they determined the structures of chromosomes are all different. Yet they also found distinct clusters with what appear to be common structures, genes that have flexible, dumbbell-like globular domains at the head and the tail.

Cheng said their analysis of the experimental images revealed three distinct clusters among the disorder. "We believe that one is an artifact, but in the other two, the structures are either closed, meaning the two globular domains at the head and the tail are more or less touching, or open, where the domains have come apart," he said. This same structural transition appeared in the group's simulations using MiChroM.

Third, the researchers found that genes contained in this dumbbell structure are all located within the string that links the globular ends. "The fact that we find these structures undergo an open-close transition plausibly suggests it's related to transcriptional regulation," Cheng said. "This is suggestive of a direct relationship between the structure and functional aspects of gene expression."

Finally, the section of chromosome 21 detailed via experiments and modeled at Rice showed the position of the "dumbbells" is dynamic, with "A-type" structures moving to the surface of the disordered chromosome when they are functionally active, while inactive or "B-type" structures tend to move to the interior.

What drives active chromatin to the surface requires further study, Onuchic said.

"Maybe genes that have to be expressed, for example in early development, are activated and then move to the core of the chromosome because they're not used again," he said. "But that remains to be proven. We have just started to show evidence in that regard."

"No one should be under the illusion that a program of research by five or six scientists can by itself ultimately answer all the questions about gene regulation," said co-author Peter Wolynes, co-director of the CTBP. "The same was true when we began to study protein folding. What was necessary there was to get to create new ways of thinking about the problem and make predictions that inspired experimentalists.

"In the same way, we now have to educate experimentalists in this new way of thinking about how chromosomes act," he said.

Some dreams are so vivid that they can be recalled as if they were movies, full of connections and with a beginning, middle and end. Others in contrast resemble WhatsApp GIFs, or at best a script for a video clip à la TikTok, often with powerful or meaningful images, but lacking that complex storylike structure.

These analogies regarding different kinds of dream report or dream narrative were provided by Natalia Mota, a neuroscientist affiliated with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte’s Brain Institute (IC-UFRN) in Brazil. Mota is one of the authors of a paper published in PLOS One on a study confirming that reports of dreams collected after rapid eye movement (REM) sleep tend to display greater complexity and connectedness than non-REM dreams.

Scientists who study sleep say it can be divided into four stages. The first two, N1 and N2, are light and typically involve short but often intense non-REM dreams. N3 is deep slow-wave sleep and is also non-REM, with few dreams or none at all. In N4, which is REM sleep, dreams tend to be longer, more expressive, and structured.

“A great deal of dream science has been produced using objective tools and human judges trained to evaluate dream reports in terms of how complex, bizarre or connected they are. We know REM dreams are longer and more like movies. Automating the process of analysis, as we did in the study, made possible the first-ever quantitative measurement of this structural difference. We developed a tool that can analyze a large amount of data at high speed and without subjective biases. Linguistic bias is absent, for example, since the tool works in any language,” said Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist affiliated with the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (NeuroMat), a Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) supported by FAPESP at the University of São Paulo (USP).

In the study, the researchers analyzed dream reports word by word using graph theory, a branch of mathematics that focuses on networks and other kinds of relationships among words or other items in a set.

“It isn’t semantic analysis. We’re not analyzing the meaning of the words. We’re dealing not with what’s said but with how it’s said,” Mota explained. “As a result, the approach permits analysis of dreams in every different kind of culture and all countries.”

The researchers used word graphs to analyze 133 dream reports supplied by 20 volunteers, who were woken up in different sleep stages but mostly during REM sleep, when dream reports are most plentiful, and during N2 (non-REM), which produces fewer dream reports.

“This is the first study to use graph theory to show that REM dream reports have more structural connectedness than non-REM dream reports [N2]. Analysis of the word graphs shows that more complex dreams are associated with more connectedness and less arbitrary or random graph structures. Not to depreciate the relevance of traditional methods, but these results are important because they show that computational methods can be applied to studies of dreaming,” said Joshua Martin, first author of the article. The study was part of his master’s research in psychobiology at UFRN, with supervision by Ribeiro and Mark Solms, a researcher at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the first to show in previous studies that dreams do not occur only during REM sleep.

“Until the start of the twenty-first century, it was taken for granted that dreams occur only during REM sleep and that it wasn’t even necessary to study dreams. REM sleep was studied and that was it,” Ribeiro said. “Now it’s agreed that we dream during both REM and non-REM sleep, but to varying degrees.”

An important point about the study is that being a cross-border collaboration it used dream reports contributed by volunteers in South Africa and analyzed in Brazil, emphasizing the universal applicability of the tool developed by the authors.

“The findings show that the tool successfully identifies the differences in dream quality and complexity between sleep stages,” Mota said. “They aren’t differences that depend on meaning. They’re differences in the way the person communicates. This is most important to avoid language bias.”

The organization and structure of dream narratives are what vary. “This leads us to questions that go beyond the meaning of words. However bizarre dreams may be, and whatever their content, what matters is how subjects organize and recount their memories,” Mota said. “We found REM dream reports to be far more complex and full of connected information.”

The word graph tool is a promising way to add to knowledge of dreams, according to the researchers. “It can be very useful for a broad analysis of dream reports worldwide, such as those in the online repository Dream Bank, which currently holds more than 20,000 reports,” Martin said.

UCLA researchers have identified a compound that can reproduce the effect of exercise in muscle cells in mice. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

Normally, muscles get stronger as they are used, thanks to a series of chemical signals inside muscle cells. The newly identified compound activates those signals, which suggests that compounds like it could eventually be used to treat people with limb girdle muscular dystrophy, a form of adolescent-onset muscular dystrophy.

When muscles aren't worked regularly, they gradually atrophy. (The phenomenon is familiar to anyone who's had a cast on their leg for several weeks.) Fortunately, for people with healthy muscles, that deterioration is reversible. Muscle use stimulates chemical messengers inside the muscle cells that increase muscle mass and strength.

People with the muscle wasting disease limb girdle muscular dystrophy have a genetic defect that interferes with that chemical messenger, making their muscles unable to respond to exercise. No amount of exercise can trigger the signal to strengthen their muscles. Because the muscles never get the message, they gradually wither, and people with the disease end up in wheelchairs, almost completely paralyzed.

"It's really dramatic. When these patients lose muscle, they struggle to gain it back," said Melissa Spencer, the paper's senior author and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

The genetic defect responsible for limb girdle muscular dystrophy causes shortages of an enzyme in muscle cells called CaMK. CaMK is responsible for launching a chain of chemical signals that turns on genes to boost the cell's ability to grow and metabolize fat, which is used as an energy source.

"CaMK activates genes that promote muscle growth and fat metabolism," said Spencer, who is also a professor of neurology and the director of the neuromuscular program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

To find a drug that could help restore the signals related to CaMK, Spencer and her colleagues worked with Robert Damoiseaux, director of UCLA's Molecular Shared Screening Resource, to screen more than 2,000 compounds to see which ones worked in lab-grown muscle cells. So far, they have tested 14 promising candidates in mice who had a genetic defect comparable to the one that causes limb girdle muscular dystrophy in people.

The testing identified a chemical compound called AMBMP that allowed mouse muscles to work and grow the way healthy muscle cells do.

"When we put the drug into mice, we found that it activated CaMK and restored all the properties we had observed as defective in our disease model," Spencer said.

Spencer and her collaborators are planning further studies to understand how AMBMP affects CaMK and to identify similar compounds that could be more effective in humans.

UCLA neurology professor Vargehese John, associate researcher Irina Kramerova and staff research associate Jesus Campagna, co-authors of the new study, are already producing new compounds similar to AMBMP. Spencer and Kramerova will test those compounds in mice to determine the best drug candidate to advance to clinical trials.

If one of those compounds is effective in human muscles, it would be a significant step for treating people with limb girdle muscular dystrophy, as well as people whose muscles have atrophied for other reasons -- because they have been bedridden for long stretches due to an illness or injury, for example.

Are obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses and more the result of a "mismatch" between the meals we eat and the foods our bodies are prepared for?

The "mismatch hypothesis" argues that each of our bodies has evolved and adapted to digest the foods that our ancestors ate, and that human bodies will struggle and largely fail to metabolize a radically new set of foods.

"Humans evolved in a very different environment than the one we're currently living in," said Amanda Lea, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI), and the first author on a study appearing in the current issue of the journal Science Advances. "No one diet is universally bad. It's about the mismatch between your evolutionary history and what you're currently eating."

The "mismatch" idea has been around for years, but it's hard to test directly. Most experiments focus on comparing Westerners to members of hunter-gatherer societies, but that inevitably conflates any effects of diet with other genetic or lifestyle differences.

Enter the Turkana -- a subsistence-level, pastoralist population from a remote desert in northwest Kenya. In the 1980s, an extreme drought coupled with the discovery of oil nearby led to rapid transformation of the region. Large segments of the population abandoned their nomadic lifestyle, some to live in villages and others in cities. Traditional Turkana still rely on livestock -- dromedary camels, zebu cattle, fat-tailed sheep, goats, and donkeys -- for subsistence, while Turkana living in cities have switched to diets that are much higher in carbohydrates and processed foods . This is a trend that is widely observed across the world, a result of increasing globalization, even in remote communities.

"We realized that we had the opportunity to study the effect of transitioning away from a traditional lifestyle, relying on almost 80% animal byproducts -- a diet extremely protein-rich and rich in fats, with very little to no carbohydrates -- to a mostly carbohydrate diet," said Julien Ayroles, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and LSI who is the senior researcher on the new paper. "This presented an unprecedented opportunity: genetically homogenous populations whose diets stretch across a lifestyle gradient from relatively 'matched' to extremely 'mismatched' with their recent evolutionary history."

To address the question, the researchers interviewed and gathered health data from 1226 adult Turkana in 44 locations. The interviewers included Lea and Ayroles as well as the research team based at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya, led by Dino Martins. Mpala is best known as a site for world-class ecological studies, but with its research into the Turkana, it is also breaking new ground on anthropology and sociology and in genetics and genomics, using a new NSF-funded genomics lab.

"This is a very important first paper from the Turkana genomics work and the Mpala NSF Genomics and Stable Isotopes Lab," said Martins. "Doing research like this study involves a huge amount of trust and respect with our local communities and with more remote communities: how we access them, how we interact. And the reason Mpala and Turkana can be a hub for this is because we have a long-term relationship. What has happened in many parts of the world where some of this research has been done, and it's gone wrong, is when you have researchers parachuting in and out of communities. That does not make people trust you -- it just creates a lot of an anxiety and problems. But here, the communities know us. We've been there for 25 years. Our research staff are drawn from local communities."

The project originated when Ayroles visited Martins, a friend from their years at Harvard University, at the Turkana Basin Institute, where Martins was based. On a brutally hot Christmas Day, deep in the desert, miles from any known village, Ayroles had been surprised to see a group of women carrying water in jars on their heads. Martins had explained that the women were carrying water back to share with their fellow Turkana, and added that these few vessels of water would be all they would drink for a week or more.

"Julian says, 'That's not possible. Nobody can survive on that little water,'" Martins recalled. "And so his scientist's brain gets thinking, and he comes up with this project to say, 'How is it that humans can survive in this incredibly harsh environment?' And I turned it around by saying, 'Actually, I think the question is, "How is it that we've adapted to survive in other environments?" Because of course, this is the environment that we all came out of."

The project grew from there, taking shape as a study of health profiles across 10 biomarkers of Turkana living in cities, villages and rural areas. The researchers found that all 10 were excellent among Turkana still living their traditional, pastoralist lifestyle -- and among the Turkana who were leading in rural villages, making and selling charcoal or woven baskets, or raising livestock for trade.

But Turkana who had moved to cities exhibited poor cardio-metabolic health, with much higher levels of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular illness and high blood pressure. The health metrics also showed that the longer Turkana had spent living in the city, the less healthy they tended to be, with life-long city dwellers experiencing the greatest risk of cardiovascular disease.

"We are finding more or less what we expected," said Ayroles. "Transitioning to this carbohydrate-based diet makes people sick."

"There's a cumulative effect," added Lea. "The more you experience the urban environment -- the evolutionarily mismatched environment -- the worse it's going to be for your health."

Ayroles cautioned that the research should not be interpreted as favoring a protein-based diet. "One of the most remarkable things about the Turkana is that if you and I went on the Turkana diet, we would get sick really quickly!" he said. "The key to metabolic health may be to align our diet and activity levels with that of our ancestors, but we still need to determine which components matter most."

The researchers have continued their surveys and data gathering, and they plan to expand the study to incorporate different indigenous peoples, in Pacific islands and elsewhere, who are also experiencing these shifts away from traditional lifestyles.

"We can learn so much about evolution and human health from the many traditional and subsistence-level populations around the globe," said Lea. "They are experiencing this extraordinary, rapid environmental change, and we can witness it in real time."

Two studies examining the impact of COVID-19 on neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) found the prevalence of COVID-19 in NICU infants is low, yet many hospitals at the start of the pandemic put in place strict parental visitation policies and scaled back NICU services such as lactation support and therapy.

In "Longitudinal Survey of SARS-CoV-2 Burden and Related Policies in US Neonatal Intensive Care Units," published in the American Journal of Perinatology, researchers, including Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, associate professor of nursing at the George Washington University and Pediatrix-affiliated neonatal nurse practitioner, conducted a series of cross-sectional surveys of U.S. NICUs between early March 2020 and late May 2020 during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, and more recently between mid July 2020 and early August 2020. They found:

Confirmed COVID-19 disease in NICU-admitted infants was rare, with the prevalence rising from 0.03% to 0.44% across the four survey rounds.

During early rounds of the survey, hospitals provided universal screenings of expectant mothers, with a preponderance to separate mother and baby for 14 days if the mother tested positive for COVID-19, and a majority of hospitals allowing infants only expressed breastmilk. Data from the final survey round, however, suggests NICUs are using the latest evidence and following American Academy of Pediatrics and Center for Disease Control guidelines to inform these policies with rapid cycle changes.

At the beginning of the pandemic, most NICUs enacted policies that leaned toward substantial caution, limiting interactions between parents and their infants at a time when close contact is critical for neonate care.

The new study aligns closely with a study published at the end of August by Darcy-Mahoney and her co-authors in the Journal of Perinatology. In "Impact of restrictions on parental presence in neonatal intensive care units related to coronavirus disease 2019," the researchers surveyed 277 facilities globally in April 2020. They found:

NICU policies allowing 24/7 parental presence decreased (from 83% before COVID-19 to 53% during COVID-19). The researchers also saw a decrease in NICUs allowing full parental participation in rounds (71-32%).

Of the 277 NICUs surveyed, 120 (43%) reported reductions in therapy services, lactation medicine, and/or social work support.

NICUs with single-family room designs best preserved 24/7 parental presence after the emergence of COVID-19 (64% of NICUs surveyed) when compared to a hybrid design (57%) or open bay design (45%).

CHAPEL HILL, NC - A study published in Cell Reports shows how next generation genetic sequencing can track mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which can in effect help with transmission tracing, diagnostic testing accuracy and vaccine effectiveness.

"Once you have the virus' genetic sequence with next generation sequencing (NGS), then you can start asking more questions," said Dirk Dittmer, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine, and senior author of the study. "Where have we seen this exact sequence before? Did it come from a different state or country? When did this patient travel there and who else may have it?"

Dittmer says this type of virus monitoring is also important in diagnostic testing. Much of the testing developed to diagnose COVID-19 looks for one portion of the gene sequence that causes the novel coronavirus. If that sequence mutates, the test is no longer accurate and results will be affected. Dittmer says that within their study, his team did find variations in the virus' genetic sequence, but fortunately none of the variations were located in the portion of the virus targeted in common diagnostic testing.

"We are concerned about future mutations though," Dittmer said. "It is inherent in a virus' nature to mutate. Changes in other areas of the genetic sequence can not only disrupt testing, but hinder the effectiveness of vaccines."

That's why Dittmer's lab has been collaborating with multiple other labs at UNC-Chapel Hill to stay up to date on what, if any changes should be made to testing protocols and possible vaccine development. Dittmer's lab receives positive SARS-CoV-2 samples from the lab of Melissa Miller, PhD, director of UNC Medical Center Microbiology and Molecular Microbiology Laboratories, where UNC's COVID-19 diagnostic testing was developed and put in place March 16.

"Because we are only looking at one gene sequence for the virus, we have told the FDA that we will continually monitor for changes in this gene sequence so that we can be assured that our test is still reliable," said Miller, a co-author of the study. "NGS will help us do that."

Dittmer's recent study is the largest to focus on suburban and rural communities. Researchers were able to reconstruct the mutational landscape of cases seen at the UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill, NC, a tertiary clinical care center. From March 30 through May 8, 175 samples from confirmed COVID-19-positive patients were analyzed.

Out of the samples tested, 57% carried the spike D614G variant noted in similar studies. The presence of this variant is associated with a higher genome copy number and its prevalence has expanded throughout the pandemic. The genetic variations found in these samples also support the hypotheses that the majority of cases in North Carolina originated from people traveling within the U.S. rather than internationally.

With a grant from the N.C. Policy Collaboratory based at UNC-Chapel Hill, Dittmer's lab will continue using NGS to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus through the remainder of 2020. The goal is to enroll every patient at UNC Hospitals with flu or respiratory symptoms for COVID-19 diagnostic testing. These samples will be sequenced and compiled to form a comprehensive profile of any virus that these patients carry, information that will continue to help a community of researchers in their fight against SARS-CoV-2 and potentially novel coronaviruses.

New radio images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show for the first time the direct effect of volcanic activity on the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Io.

Io is the most volcanically active moon in our solar system. It hosts more than 400 active volcanoes, spewing out sulfur gases that give Io its yellow-white-orange-red colors when they freeze out on its surface.

Although it is extremely thin - about a billion times thinner than Earth's atmosphere - Io has an atmosphere that can teach us about Io's volcanic activity and provide us a window into the exotic moon's interior and what is happening below its colorful crust.

Previous research has shown that Io's atmosphere is dominated by sulfur dioxide gas, ultimately sourced from volcanic activity. "However, it is not known which process drives the dynamics in Io's atmosphere," said Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley. "Is it volcanic activity, or gas that has sublimated (transitioned from solid to gaseous state) from the icy surface when Io is in sunlight?"

To distinguish between the different processes that give rise to Io's atmosphere, a team of astronomers used ALMA to make snapshots of the moon when it passed in and out of Jupiter's shadow (they call this an "eclipse").

"When Io passes into Jupiter's shadow, and is out of direct sunlight, it is too cold for sulfur dioxide gas, and it condenses onto Io's surface. During that time we can only see volcanically-sourced sulfur dioxide. We can therefore see exactly how much of the atmosphere is impacted by volcanic activity," explained Statia Luszcz-Cook from Columbia University, New York.

Thanks to ALMA's exquisite resolution and sensitivity, the astronomers could, for the first time, clearly see the plumes of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and sulfur monoxide (SO) rise up from the volcanoes. Based on the snapshots, they calculated that active volcanoes directly produce 30-50 percent of Io's atmosphere.

The ALMA images also showed a third gas coming out of volcanoes: potassium chloride (KCl). "We see KCl in volcanic regions where we do not see SO2 or SO," said Luszcz-Cook. "This is strong evidence that the magma reservoirs are different under different volcanoes."

Io is volcanically active due to a process called tidal heating. Io orbits Jupiter in an orbit that is not quite circular and, like our Moon always faces the same side of Earth, so does the same side of Io always face Jupiter. The gravitational pull of Jupiter's other moons Europa and Ganymede causes tremendous amounts of internal friction and heat, giving rise to volcanoes such as Loki Patera, which spans more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) across. "By studying Io's atmosphere and volcanic activity we learn more about not only the volcanoes themselves, but also the tidal heating process and Io's interior," added Luszcz-Cook.

A big unknown remains the temperature in Io's lower atmosphere. In future research, the astronomers hope to measure this with ALMA. "To measure the temperature of Io's atmosphere, we need to obtain a higher resolution in our observations, which requires that we observe the moon for a longer period of time. We can only do this when Io is in sunlight since it does not spend much time in eclipse," said de Pater. "During such an observation, Io will rotate by tens of degrees. We will need to apply software that helps us make un-smeared images. We have done this previously with radio images of Jupiter made with ALMA (https://public.nrao.edu/news/image-release-alma-shows-whats-inside-jupiters-storms/) and the Very Large Array (VLA) (https://public.nrao.edu/news/vla-jupiter-atmosphere/)."